A video of four lions preying upon a heron at a Dutch zoo, shot last year and reposted on YouTube Wednesday, reminds us that you can take the lion out of the wild, but you can’t take the wild out of the lion.

In the video, a blue heron at the Artis Royal Zoo wandered into a small pool while a group of four lions were basking in the sun, about 25 yards away.

First, if I didn’t write it, I would never watch the clip on YouTube because I am disgusted with the way a giant lion family together mauled a defenseless heron. Though lions are predators, watching that killing scene over and over to have a good description made me kind of uncomfortable.

Second, the catchy sentence “you can take the lion out of the wild, but you can’t take the wild out of the lion” above was not authored by me but my editor. I really love the way he puts American expressions in my works that helps Americanize my writing. But he said he invented that sentence based on the well-known saying “you can take a man out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the man.”